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Marines Are Flying Only 60% of F-18 Hornets They Need « Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary

CAPITOL HILL: Chronic maintenance problems with the aging F-18 Hornet are hobbling the Marines, leaving them with less than 60 percent of the strike fighters they need to conduct training and operations, the deputy commandant for aviation told the Senate this afternoon. “I pulled up our readiness data just yesterday,” Lt. Gen. Jon Davis told the seapower subcommittee…

CAPITOL HILL: Chronic maintenance problems with the aging F-18 Hornet are hobbling the Marines, leaving them with less than 60 percent of the strike fighters they need to conduct training and operations, the deputy commandant for aviation told the Senate this afternoon.

“I pulled up our readiness data just yesterday,” Lt. Gen. Jon Davis told the seapower subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We have 87 aircraft that were mission capable. Out of those 87 airplanes, I put 30 airplanes in the training squadron and 40 airplanes deployed forward. There’s not a lot left for the [remaining] units to train with.”

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. photo

Lt. Gen. Jon Davis

How many Hornets should the Marine Corps have ready to go? Under the current, shrunken force structure, 150: a training squadron of 30 and 12 combat squadrons of 10 aircraft each. Until 18 months ago, that figure was 174 — 30 training aircraft and 12 squadrons of 12 aircraft each — but the Marines decided to shrink each squadron to reflect the reality of insufficient aircraft.

via breakingdefense.com

This is the Marines own damn fault.

They made the decision back in the late 1990s to not buy any E/F model SuperHornets, and gamble that they could keep the legacy Hornet fleet flying until the JSF (now F-35B) came online.

Well, not surprisingly, the most complex airplane in the world is over budget and behind schedule.

The Navy was practically begging the Marines to buy SuperHornets, to drive down the unit costs, but the Marine fear was that doing so would push the F-35B purchase even further to the out years, and they would be facing an end of life crisis with the AV-8B fleet. Which, they're pretty much facing anyway.

I get the doctrinal and operational reasons why the Marines felt so compelled to bet the future of the Marine Corps as a service on the MV-22B, the F-35B, and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. But it also looks like they might have lost the bet.

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Responses to “Marines Are Flying Only 60% of F-18 Hornets They Need « Breaking Defense – Defense industry news, analysis and commentary”

  1. Krag

    Agree completely. If I had my way, all of Marine Air would get their walking papers and we start over with a new batch of Lts from The Basic School. Start over from the beginning.
    We have no one to blame but ourselves for the idiotic decision making that has come out of Marine Air for the past two decades. And they (Marine Air) have the gall to now whine to the press about the situation they created. Own it, boys, own it.

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  2. Quartermaster

    The navy should have simply told them that they were buying it regardless. The marines are owned by the Navy, regardless of what they think of themselves.

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  3. Krag

    RE: “The marines are owned by the Navy, regardless of what they think of themselves.”
    Um, no.

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  4. Xbradtc

    Krag is correct that the legal relationship between the Navy and the Marine Corps is juuuust a tad more complex.
    The Marine Corps is a legally separate service from the Navy. They just happen to both fall under the Department of the Navy.
    And as a practical matter, no service has a lobbying arm anywhere near the Marines ability to lobby Congress to do things they want, or not do things they don’t want.

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  5. NaCly Dog

    The US Marine Corps is a department of the US Navy.
    That’s right. A department.
    The men’s department.
    Hmm. That scanned better back in the day.

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